STOCKBRIDGE — Are you familiar with Buffalo Calf Road Woman? Marsha P. Johnson? How about Marty Goddard or Pamela Colman Smith or Zofia Posmysz?

These are just a few of the 286 women featured in Anita Kunz’s “Original Sisters: Portraits of Tenacity and Courage,” on view at the Norman Rockwell Museum through May 26, 2025.

When you find them on the walls, you’ll find out that Buffalo Calf Road Woman is the Northern Cheyenne “who has become known as Custer’s final foe” or that Goddard, a victim’s rights activist, is the inventor of the rape kit. You can learn that Smith was the illustrator of the most recognized tarot card deck in the world and that Johnson was a Black transgender woman was one of the most prominent figures of the gay rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s in New York City.

While you’ll find plenty of familiar faces — Kamala Harris, Madam C.J. Walker, Gloria Steinem, Florence Nightingale, Zora Neale Hurston — there are just as many you won’t recognize. And you’ll want to know more about them than what’s presented in the paragraph below each illustrated portrait.

“My role was to present these women,” Kunz, an acclaimed illustrator based in Toronto who has worked extensively with Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and more, said during a press preview of the exhibit. “There’s just a little bit of information about them to tease you. It’s like an appetizer. If you want to know more about them, it’s yours to look up.”

And, the portraits on display are only a small portion of Kunz’s “Original Sisters” project — she’s created 460 portraits of women and doesn’t see an end in sight.

“At first, I said I was stopping at 150, then it was 250 and then 350,” she said. “And I said, ‘Where am I going to stop? And then somebody suggested, ‘Why don’t you do 365? That’s a woman a day.’ But then, I discovered Theresa Kachindamoto.”

Kachindamoto, a chief to over 900,000 in Malawi, has dissolved over 4,000 child marriages, outlawed the practice and insists that both girls and boys receive an education.

“She does this under daily death threats,” Kunz said. “I thought, I have to keep going. I have to paint her.”

And the list of women she needs to paint keeps growing. Most recently, on commission from the Norman Rockwell Museum, she painted three women from the Berkshires — Elizabeth Freeman, whose pursuit of freedom ended slavery in Massachusetts; Edith Wharton, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and Shannon Hosley, president of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians.

INSPIRATION ABOUNDS

Her sources of inspiration, she said, are as diverse as her subjects — encyclopedias, suggestions from friends, the daily Google Doodle, blogs, online archives and “Overlooked,” the New York Times column dedicated to printing stories about remarkable women who should have, but didn’t receive obituaries.

But, the inspiration for the entire project happened back in 2019, when she was participating in the Marilyn Faison Artist Residency on Peaks Island, Maine. On a boat tour of the islands, near a windswept, craggy rock, the boat’s captain told the story of a transgender woman who had lived at that spot for many years in the 1800s. The woman was found dead — wearing a kimono — floating in the bay.

Kunz wanted to know more about the woman but couldn’t find anything. It led her to think about all the untold stories — women who had been left out of the story, who had been forgotten. It made her think about all the woman artists she didn’t learn about in art school; all the women who had been written out of the story. But, as a working illustrator, she had little time to take on a project of her own.

And then, 2020 arrived.

PROJECT BEGINNINGS

“For a while, I had a germ of an idea to create portraits of women,” she said. “I just finally decided, just paint the portraits. Just paint portraits of whoever you can find, whoever you think should be known. There’s nothing more complicated than that about the project. I just found these women; I wanted to paint their portraits. It was a journey of discovery through the pandemic. I painted one a day and I wanted to share what I had learned.”

The project, she said, really put things in perspective for her at that time.

“I would read about this woman during the Holocaust in the camps, who decided to teach the children in the camp. They all did these drawings. They all perished but the drawings survived. I thought, I’m told to sit home and I can do that — relative to what these women [went through], all these stories of tenacity and courage. I spent one day with an incredible woman, and the next day I’d read about another woman and the day after that about another. It really saved my sanity during the pandemic.”

For some of the women, Kunz had no image to create her work. Such is the case of the portrait, “Anonymous,” which is an homage to the first women painters.

“National Geographic has determined through hand analysis that some of the ancient cave paintings were actually done by women and not by men as originally thought. So I thought, ‘Wait, were women the first artists? That’s great.’ We should know this. Nobody knows this stuff.”

She began contemplating how she could paint the first “real original sister.”

“Scientists have pieced together what people from certain eras look like, so I did my best using the references I could. And then, instead of putting a signature on it — I put the signatures of the women on most of them — I used a handprint for her signature. It refers back to the handprints on the cave walls.”

Because she was painting a portrait a day, Kunz said the portraits took on a unique style.

ZEROING IN

“I tried to get rid of all of the superfluous stuff. I just tried to make the women as compelling as possible. I didn’t need all the background stuff … It doesn’t matter if there is a house behind her or whatever. I was just concentrating on the person, zeroing in on what I felt was important about her and the best way that I could communicate that in a simple way,” she said.

That differs from her work as an illustrator.

“When I’m working as an illustrator, I mean everything is really kind of considered. Usually, what they expect from me is more demure — more browns, earth tones,” she said. “In this case, that went out the window, because I wanted to do colorful art, that even children would like. I didn’t want to make it somber. I think this is a celebration. I was challenging myself to work with bright colors.”

This is the third iteration of “Original Sisters.” A show of 40 portraits was held at the Iona Studio in Toronto in 2022, a year after her book, “Original Sisters: Portraits of Tenacity and Courage,” featuring 150 women was published. “Original Sisters: 365 Portraits of Tenacity and Courage.” was shown at the TAP Center for Creativity, in London, in late 2022.

IF YOU GO

What: “Original Sisters: Portraits of Tenacity and Courage” 

Who: Illustrator Anita Kunz

Where: Norman Rockwell Museum, 9 Glendale Road, Stockbridge

On view: Through May 26, 2025

Museum hours: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Closed Wednesday.